Republicans and conservatives should be doing all they can to make the 2012 election another referendum on the damage Obamacare will do to the American economy and health system.

To make that happen, they need to resurrect Obamacare as an issue in the legislative process. Last January, as one of its first acts, the Republican House passed a full repeal bill, sending a strong signal to the voters who returned them to power. Not surprisingly, repeal failed in the Senate.

In the months since that original vote, however, the issue has fallen off the public radar. House committees have held useful hearings, and conducted useful investigations, but the issue hasn’t gotten much attention because there has been no high-profile political fight to force additional press coverage.

That would change if House Republicans started bringing up repeal provisions, one by one, beginning with the individual mandate. Yes, the mandate is under review in the courts, and could very well go by the wayside even without legislative repeal. But that does not mean it can’t also be targeted by Congress. Indeed, a legal challenge and a legislative challenge might reinforce one another, as justices who see strong political opposition to a provision could be more likely to throw it out.

Bringing the individual mandate up for repeal would also force an incredibly difficult vote for Obamacare’s apologists. The vast majority of voters oppose the health care overhaul, and the Congressional Budget Office says repeal would reduce federal spending and budget deficits by more than $200 billion over a decade. Democrats who defend requiring Americans to pay higher premiums for a product they don’t want do so at their peril.

'When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.'

That quote is by Albert Shanker, the teachers’ union president, in a moment of brutal honesty.

John Stossel has a question: If education spending is at an all-time high, why are test scores flat-lining?

Answer: Gubmint.

School spending has gone through the roof and test scores are flat. While most every other service in life has gotten faster, better, and cheaper, one of the most important things we buy — education — has remained completely stagnant, unchanged since we started measuring it in 1970.

Why no improvement? Because K-12 education is a government monopoly and monopolies don’t improve. The government-school monopoly claims: Education is too important to leave to the free market.

(Rasmussen) -- Half of American Adults (48%) think labor unions have outlasted their usefulness, but there’s a sharp difference of opinion between Republicans and Democrats on the question.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that only 30% disagree and say that unions have not outlived their role. Twenty-one percent (21%) are not sure.

These findings are consistent with attitudes found two years ago. At that time, 45% said labor unions actually make America weaker, while 26% believed they make the country stronger and 13% said they have no impact.

Yet while 68% of Republicans and 54% of adults not affiliated with either of the major political parties believe unions have outlived their usefulness, 52% of Democrats still see a need for them.

Among working Americans who do not belong to a union, just 13% would like to join a labor union where they work. That’s up slightly from nine percent in March 2009. Seventy-eight percent (78%) would not like to join a union.

In Ron Suskind’s new book, President Obama, in an interview with the author, compares himself to Jimmy Carter. “Carter, Clinton and I all have sort of the disease of being policy wonks,” he says, according to excerpts. Karl Rove, a former senior adviser to Pres. George W. Bush, tells National Review Online that he is amused by Obama’s navel gazing.

“President Obama has himself backwards,” Rove says. “His problem is not that he was a policy wonk: it’s that he wasn’t. He refused to get his hands dirty writing a good stimulus bill, drafting bipartisan health-care reform, or negotiating with Republicans. He found it easier to tell them ‘I won, so get lost.’”

“The president is comfortable with a technocratic approach because he is an imperious, arrogant, know-it-all left wing technocrat who leaves the details to his congressional Democratic allies, like Congressman Dave Obey with the stimulus bill,” Rove adds. “He is content to check the box on his list of achievements and tour the country with his teleprompter giving speeches.”

As Mike Allen of Politico reports, Suskind’s book, Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President, “portrays Obama as uncertain and second-guessing himself.” In one passage, the president laments the “heavy” burden of the presidency. In another, he tells the author that it is “absolutely legitimate” for critics to complain about his “technocratic approach to government.”

Alinsky Nation.

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"A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable for he is known and he carries his banners openly. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared." — Cicero, 106 BC-43 BC